Bill Fontana is an American composer and artist who developed an international reputation for his pioneering experiments in sound. SInce the early 70’s Fontana has used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. He has realized sound sculptures and radio projects for museums and broadcast organizations around the world. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Post Museum in Frankfurt, the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna, both Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, the 48th Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of NSE in Sydney and the new Kolumba Museum in Cologne. He has done major radio sound art projects for the BBC, the European Broadcast Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Swedish Radio, Radio France and the Austrian State Radio.
Was our resident for the month of December 2020. Yolande is an artist and researcher exploring ideas of sonic consciousness, creating installations and performances with sound and video to create intimate and visceral experiences that heighten awareness of our relationship to the environment. Her projects consider techniques of navigation, expanding perception beyond the range of human senses, the technological mediation of underwater environments and our relationship to other species. Her projects on underwater sound aim to bring us closer to this inaccessible environment, encouraging connection, understanding and empathy with the ocean.
Anna Nacher, PhD, associate professor at the Jagiellonian University. Her research interests include digital culture, cultural theory, media art, sound studies and e-literature. She currently pursues a 3-year long research project on the aesthetics of post-digital imagery on a grant from Polish National Science Centre. She is also a part-time musician and sound artist focusing on field recordings.
Joel Ong (PhD, MSc.Bioart) is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment. His recent works explore the visibility and audibility of ambient phenomena with a particular focus on the wind and the atmospheric microbiome. His individual and collaborative works have been shown at festivals and galleries internationally such as the Currents New Media Festival, Nuit Blanche Toronto, ISEA, the Seattle Art Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, the Penny Stamps Gallery and the Ontario Science Centre. Joel is an alumni of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts in Perth, Western Australia, and holds a PhD from DXARTS at the University of Washington. He was a recipient of the Petro-Canada Young Innovators Award in 2020 and is currently an artist with the Biofrictions Creative Europe transdisciplinary research project. He is Assistant Professor in Computational Arts and Director of Sensorium:The Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University.
Sholeh Asgary is an interdisciplinary sound artist whose immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history, through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary has exhibited and performed at such institutions as ARoS Kunstmuseum, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Euphrat Museum, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Her work has received support through numerous residencies and awards, some of which include Mass MoCA (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), California Arts Council (2020), and Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Commissioning grant through Dance Elixir (2019). Asgary is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice and serves on the curatorial council at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA. Born in Tehran, Iran, she holds degrees from Mills College (MFA) and San Francisco State University (BA).
Robertina Šebjanič is an internationally awarded artist, whose work revolves around the biological, chemical, political and cultural realities of aquatic environments and explores humankind’s impact on other species and on the rights of non-human entities, while calling for strategies emphatic towards other species to be adopted. In her analysis of the theoretical framework of the Anthropocene, the artist uses the term ‘aquatocene’ and ‘aquaforming’ to refer to humans’ impact on aquatic environments. Her works received awards and nominations at Prix Ars Electronica, Starts Prize, Falling Walls.
Patricia Cadavid is an immigrant, artist, and researcher born in Colombia. Her work looks at the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media and sound from the migratory experience and decolonial & anti-colonial thinking. Student at the Interface Culture Lab (Kunstuniversität Linz), she received her BFA from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and her MA from the Universitat Politècnica de València, multimedia &Visual arts program. Her work has been exhibited in different festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), ADAF (Greece), or the NIME and SEAMUS conferences as well as in several spaces in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Colombia.
Iman Person is a first-generation Jamaican-American artist and cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of Black and Indigenous technologies, and their connections to ritual, the land, language, and cosmic time. Her work goes beyond traditional Western views of technology to offer a somatic examination of cultural diasporas within the Americas and the Caribbean. In her practice, she sees the body as deeply connected to the elements, with her recent works focusing on air and ether as points of convergence for exploring collective histories, migration, and diasporic memory. Using Africana cosmologies and personal experience, Iman channels speculative visions of Black futurity through intuitive writing, video, real-time data, experimental sound, sensory ethnography, and object-making to shape unexplored ideas concerning living archives and sovereignty while navigating the delicate terrain occurring at the edges of multiple worlds.
